Even Hurricane Sandy couldn't drown out competing campaign narratives

Long Island, N.Y. — As Hurricane Sandy surged across the U.S. east coast, President Barack Obama cancelled campaign events in Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, rerouting Air Force One to the nation’s capital.

His Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, axed appearances in battleground states and recast an Ohio rally as a “storm relief event.”

Premier polling organizations shut down their tracking operations for fear of skewed data. Living rooms were flooded and millions of voters from the Carolinas north to Maine lost power, robbing campaign ads of viewers.

Because of Sandy and the destruction it wrought, the most visible and tangible aspects of the electoral campaign almost disappeared in the critical final push for the White House. But beneath it all, a key undercurrent of electoral politics raged on: the narrative.

In politics, nothing is more important than a campaign’s ability to communicate a compelling narrative — to tell a story that connects voters with a candidate and a particular vision for the future.

“Stories are the way we communicate the moral core of who we are and what we’re doing,” said Marshall Ganz, nicknamed “Obama’s organizer-in-chief” four years ago, now a lecturer on public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

“So campaigns need to have a strong narrative about the challenges at hand, the sources of hope and the kinds of choices we’re being called upon to make.”

Hurricane Sandy has catapulted one of those choices squarely to the fore, at least momentarily distilling the campaign to this: What is the role of government?

“The most significant impact of Sandy is that it fits into a narrative about the value of government in a crisis,” said Paul Bledsoe, a White House staffer for Bill Clinton who recently launched a political consultancy in Washington.

“Obama has argued that government has a critical role in rectifying our economic crisis, whereas Romney has argued that it’s part of the problem and should have a lesser role.”

That conversation, he added, benefits the president in a very specific way: Just weeks ago, Mr. Romney proposed privatizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the government body that has come to the aid of so many this past week.

The storm’s fallout could also hijack the narrative of the campaign and prove hugely advantageous to the president on a more emotional level.

For days, Mr. Obama has been seen and heard consoling victims with warm hugs and hopeful words. He has earned the praise of Chris Christie, New Jersey’s Republican Governor and Romney supporter, who called the president’s leadership through this crisis “outstanding.”

Without any effort from the Obama campaign, he has been cast as a strong, bipartisan figure at a time when voters are fed up with political extremes and crave visionary leadership.

“The president is seen acting as the nation’s chief executive in an emergency and the Obama campaign is more than happy to allow that to be his primary reaction,” Mr. Bledsoe said.

“It’s much, much trickier for the Romney campaign.”

Although Hurricane Sandy’s direct effect on the presidential race is impossible to pin down, it has undoubtedly impacted the campaign conversation in a way neither side could have predicted or controlled.

Under any other circumstances, though, strategists and staffers would be damned to have the narrative driven by anything other than their own machine.

“It’s a point of fact that the campaign that defines the question that’s being asked and answered — and the context of that question, too — controls the dialogue,” said Eddie Mahe, former deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee and campaign strategist for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. “I can’t overstate how important that it is.”

It is so important there is an entire venue dedicated to controlling the narrative after presidential and vice-presidential debates. Spokesmen and surrogates descend upon what is known inside the Beltway as Spin Alley — a space, usually about the size of a school gymnasium, where spin-doctors argue why their candidate won.

The dozens of spinmeisters attract scrums of reporters and television crews thrusting microphones and tape-recorders in front of their fast-moving lips. The room is a sea of red and blue placards — red for Republican spokesmen, blue for Democrats — as volunteers walk with hand-held signs denoting which spin-doctor is which amid the melee.

After the second presidential debate at Long Island’s Hofstra University, the Obama machine said the president had proved himself a strong leader who will keep fighting for Americans, while Republican surrogates maintained strong oratorical skills do not mend a floundering economy.

Spin Alley became the physical place, then, where the over-arching Obama narrative — “Let’s stay the course, work together and your patience will pay off” — competed with Mr. Romney’s “Believe in America, don’t be patient and trust me to fix the broken economy.”

“The other word for spin is rhetoric, and I mean that in the classical sense of the word,” Mr. Bledsoe said.

“Campaigns are about ideas and messages that are communicated through language. Just because we call it ‘spin’ doesn’t make it any less important — it’s always been the centrepiece of elections, debates and ultimately democracy.”

The campaigns that win, Mr. Mahe said, are the ones that have the most disciplined narrative and, most importantly, the most dominant one — rarely does more than one message get airtime, so the louder and more compelling one wins out.

The Clinton campaign’s “It’s the economy, stupid” in 1992 drowned out anything the Bush Sr. camp could conjure up; George W. Bush’s 2004 national security message in a post-9/11 world hit home more than anything Senator John Kerry could deploy; and Mr. Obama’s “Yes, we can!” narrative sank John McCain from the start.

Asked if there is a moment in the election fight where control of the narrative is most prized, Mr. Mahe replied, “How about all the time? Seriously.

“Any day there’s a discussion taking place that was purposefully created and driven by your opponent, it’s almost always a disadvantage to your candidate.”

Many wonder why the Romney campaign waited so long to define its candidate — why they would let the Obama people fill the vacuum with a story that portrayed him as a wooden, greedy plutocrat voters could not trust.

Mr. Romney was the presumed nominee long before he officially got the job at the Republican convention in August, but it was not until then the campaign worked to paint him as a feeling, trustworthy family man, capable of creating jobs.

Steven Michels, a political scientist at Connecticut’s Sacred Heart University, said the campaign’s initial silence might have had less to do with ineptitude and more to do with strategy: When your opponent is better than you at something, you can avoid the subject or address it head-on in a bid to close the gap.

“The thought might have been, ‘If he’s not the kind of guy you want to have a beer with and instead looks more like your boss, then go with that story and present him as the capable CEO who can fix the economy.’ ”

Although the Romney campaign has improved his image and ramped up its “real change” narrative, Mr. Mahe said the detriment of the original message vacuum was compounded by the leaked 47% video, which bolstered the Obama storyline Mr. Romney does not care about the downtrodden.

As far as Mr. Mahe has heard, Mr. Romney had never discussed his personal views about the 47% with his staff — proving, he said, untested thoughts should go unsaid.

That is a message he drilled home to a notoriously outspoken Newt Gingrich back in the 1980s, when the former House speaker was launching his second congressional bid.

“I told him, ‘Any time you get a brilliant thought behind the podium, swallow it,’ ” said Mr. Mahe, now a strategic communications consultant at the law firm of Foley & Lardner. “Brilliant thoughts, unvetted, often lead to disaster.”

That might be how the campaigns ended up with “You didn’t build that” (Obama) or “I’m not concerned about the very poor” (Romney). Or even “binders full of women,” which made waves on Twitter after Mr. Romney uttered the phrase during the second debate.

In an era of instant communication, a campaign’s spin must be louder and bigger than ever before; it has to overcome whatever messaging is taking hold long before spinners appear in Spin Alley, Mr. Mahe said.

But now, as the candidates step back onto the campaign trail in full force, they are trying desperately to ensure their narrative is the clearest and most resonant in this final sprint.

With just days left to make up their minds, voters will have to decide whether they want to “stay the course” with Mr. Obama or open a new chapter under Mr. Romney’s promise of a “better America.”